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Micah S. Vernon

@micahsvernon.bsky.social

Writer. Stories in The Deadlands, Orchid's Lantern, and 3AM Magazine.

123 Posts167 Follower145 Folgt
Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · 2d ago

Unexpectedly, the new Adam Ouston novel landed at my doorstep today, and as a noted skeptic on the "single-sentence" novel phenomenon, I have flicked through and confirmed: it's actually a single sentence!

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Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · last wk.

I don't know who else is up for the Booker but if M. John Harrison is up for it then I know in my heart of hearts he deserves it the most. Not only for the fact that The End of Everything is a brilliant novel, but that he is one of the best writers of truly strange fiction we have, period.

Anton Hur@antonhur.com · last wk.

The existence of the visible literary translator unsettles the Romantic notion of the author, that single genius figure of AUTHORity who exerts complete control over the text

Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · 2w ago

I'll admit I had very little faith in Nolan's Odyssey, but much to the chagrin of all the historical accuracy-cels, this film, while understandably imperfect, captured the relevance of Homeric myth in the modern cultural context, and was a tremendous rendition of this story.

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Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · 2w ago

First time I've knowingly come across censored language in a book. The strange thing is, I have definitely seen the N-word used in Penguin published books before, so is this the standard going forward for them? This is a 2022 edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

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Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · 2w ago

I've come to the conclusion that Marathon is just the best fucking game ever and despite having an extremely tough year, this game has genuinely kept me going. It will go down as one of gaming's biggest tragedies that it hasn't been successful.

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Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · 2w ago

I have yet to see the film but I respect any adaptation of ancient texts playing into the vast distance of time while accentuating their timelessness. Far more preferable to lamely affecting a sense of authenticity with the idea that a British accent is somehow less anachronistic.

Paul Cornish@paulgcornish.bsky.social · 2w ago

Interesting bit in this Variety article about The Odyssey where the American writer takes issue with the characters' American accents, dismisses Greek accents as "a bit much", & argues that British (I assume he really means English) accents would have been fine. variety.com/2026/film/ne...

Every character in Nolan’s film not only has an American accent but does little to adjust their tone of voice. It’s especially jarring in the cases of Benny Safdie’s ruthless warrior Agamemnon, since Safdie doesn’t exactly have the most imposing of voices (the film also goes through great pains to avoid showing Safdie’s face), and Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus, king of Sparta, who sounds just like, well, streetwise Jon Bernthal. Having every actor affect a Greek accent would be a bit much, so perhaps the British-accent route, a la “I, Claudius,” would prove less distracting.
Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 3w ago

Four years, four pages. A novel born out of the question: What if one could experience one’s death? Or rather, How does one live with this impossibility? The first of the impossibilities. Disembodied remains one of the most intense writing moments of my life. To the forgotten.

I DIED ON THE TWELFTH of September, at the height of happiness. Clothed in the shadow of the chestnut tree outside the house, my body preserved the posture of a living woman hours after my last breath. Whereas at first I struggled with snakes under my tongue, around my ankles and my wrists, snakes clotting the blood under the skin of my lips and rearranging my limbs to fit the encasement of this new reality, I now watch lavender clouds pass by. A book slides gently from my ashen hand and as it falls on the grass lets out a sound much like how I have always imagined collapsing into the soul of another in the absence of touch might sound. A tender breeze instructs the memory of my fingers on how to manipulate time: as if its seconds were the puppets and my fingers the puppeteers. My eyes count birds in flight as necrotic wounds on the diseased flesh of the skies. From this mouth full of dissent, my confession weaves unseen threads between the earthly space that my remains inhabit still and the myth-laden fragmentation of other more ethereal worlds-there is a magical calling in this ordinary language, a wailing correspondence with all structures of human consciousness, anexhortation of that which I have come to know as the soul. Against the background of rotting flesh, existence carries out its sacred rituals unscathed by lingering funereal har-monies. Aware of the impossibility of touch, I resume my count with the dull and inaccessible gaze of someone whose history I wish to forget. The ghost of thought falls captive to the absence of a voice, and as the rain pours down to wash me, a thick darkness invades my mind, penetrating its every corner—a darkness that uproots and relocates shards of memory as if it were repositioning the hours on the clock in the image of a time that only goes backward. A new uneasiness arises. The color of water has settled on the inside of my eyelids. Imagine floating in the middle of a sea. There is nothing but sea all around you, the blue sky itself is a mere extension of this sea. Imagine seeing this sea for the first time, imagine not being able to think of it as a relatively small sea, not being able to divide it into fragments and portions with the blades of the mind-not even empirically. You wish to touch and unravel the waves but you are not able to see them as anything other than parts of this sea, as crashing slivers of this little sea, and yet, it does not mean that what travels through your mind is pure intuition, the a priori intuition of the sea, but in fact a highly a posteriori experience. Imagine Aoating in the middle of this sea. You say it is false that one can think of space as infinite: you are not able to think of infinity, you can only fathom the possibility that to a given space, you can add another and another; you can only conceive the possibility of being able to expand its boundaries. Here, where thought floats in the middle of the sea under my eyelids, I find myself unable to argue that space is a priori intuition, not based on its infiniteness, for I myself cannot think of infinite space nor can I envision infinite worlds in which the darkness that falls over my lifeless body does so for any other reason than to erase all connections with the past, and I think of how at the heart of the idea of eternal return lies one of the most rudimentary forms of human thought: analogy. The most common expression of this idea is the cyclic return: one world describing a cycle of events disappears and another is born describing the same cycle—I believe it was Goethe who ascribed to this thought the shape of the spiral. Things repeat themselves but they describe an ascent, therefore although one encounters sameness, it will always be on different planes. Nietzsche's eternal return is based on the scientific myth of atoms, not a repetition of the world but rather a repetition in its most concrete sense: every gesture, every event, every raindrop, every fall. And there are of course others who have depicted eternal return as something contemporaneous with the mythical age. Under the shadow of the chestnut tree, all returns become patterns that germinate from the pure intuition of the concrete, a law of the regeneration of existence in the name of a life I long to both forget and leave written on my flesh. Here, eternal return holds the double meaning of concluding one world synthetically while also opening perspectives for another, with the emphasis on being-even when one is embraced by darkness-but as soon as other frameworks are created and history is refreshed, it will follow the path of new forms, of a body floating in the middle of the sea, of a woman becoming memory. All we see of her is a hand. I fall to my knees in the rain and find myself loathing its wetness. I loathe the dirt that infiltrates my stockings and mends my skin; the dirt that makes me undress of its memory. On the ground, under the burden of water that falls both here and there at the same time and with the same infectious rage, striving to provide myself not with an answer but with a reading of what collapsed me, I think of the reality of consciousness and how, in itself, consciousness is felt, not known, for it is the organ that knows but cannot know itself, same as the eye sees but cannot see it-self. It is felt, not in the ordinary sense of the word -and not with the senses themselves. Without being able to define it, without being able to provide you now with an organic sequence, I know that consciousness is in itself, and I cannot help but wonder why I chose this moment, why is this particular memory traveling through my body and not any other—perhaps when rain falls, it does so with the memory of other rains rooted deep in the structure of its drops. Nevertheless—I allow it to become my present. I was not expecting rain this late in winter, not for days
Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · last mo.

People love knowing things. They conflate understanding with depth or complexity. You can tell this is a red flag for any work of art when someone's enjoyment of it is conveyed by proving they understood basic themes or plot points.

Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · last mo.

Finishing up 14 by Peter Clines and, despite the fact that I'm a big Lovecraft fan, I think this makes a good case for why Lovecraft's work should be completely erased from existence. Just so people like Clines don't get any more bright ideas and write anything like 14 again.

Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · last mo.

"Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being."

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Micah S. Vernon@micahsvernon.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Was having trouble deciding on a book after My Tender Matador; needed something just as evocative. Chose to start a re-read Moby-Dick—somehow, so far, even better than I remembered. Taking it slow when every sentence is so rich.

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